Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original -- by Robin G.G. Kelley "The piano ain't got no wrong notes." Massive biography (450+ pages, and 100 pages of footnotes!!).
The first book in the series -Bluebird, Bluebird- was really good and won a handful of awards. This sequel is, in my opinion, better at fleshing out the main character while introducing just enough side stories to keep things fresh. I found it overall to be a stronger story. The final wrapup was a bit quick, but then there's a wonderful twist at the end relating back to the first book. No word of a third book yet, but there needs to be at least one more.
UPDATED???? You mean he found more stuff? I remember being amazed that he found a newspaper article in a small local paper about Monk when he was 6 or 7 and he won something at an insignificant summer camp (an article that, unsurprisingly, misspelled "Thelonious" IIRC). So he managed to dig up new stuff???? Impressive.
Came across this book which goes nicely with the travel-based theme of my freshman world lit class and my longtime interest in the Beat Generation... World Citizen: Allen Ginsberg as Traveller, which takes off with the realization that Ginsberg eventually made it to over 60 foreign countries over the course of his life (and got himself thrown out of two of them, Cuba and Yugoslavia) and wrote a lot of poetry based on the experience, by Scottish writer and founder of Beatdom magazine, David Wills.
Not that: though it will help a lot if I ever teach on this theme again, because poetry related to travel gave me a hard time when I was putting the reading list together: I went with a collection of haibun by Basho, including his most famous Narrow Road to the Interior. That was easier to work in than Dante's Divine Comedy. While they're not his best poems, IMO, poems like "Wales Visitation," "Kral Magales" (or however you spell "King of May" in Czech along with a lot of poems from Wichata Vortex Sutra would fit the bill... including one where he devotes five lines to my hometown as his train passes through (three of them about a junkyard which, we are proud to say, is still thriving!). Anyway, in addition to Basho, who we wrap up this week: Alexandra David-Neel's My Journey to Lhasa, Tete-Michel Kpomassie's An African in Greenland, Amitav Ghosh's In an Antique Land, Bruce Chatwin's The Songlines and starting next week and taking us through the end of the term, Turkish novelist Elif Shafak's The Forty Rules of Love: A Novel of Rumi. That book isn't perfect, but chicks dig it.
I was a fan of the Cure in the 1980's while in High School. Their song "Killing an Arab" was inspired by the book. I have always this empty feeling about the song. Finally, in 2021, I decided to read this book. I know of the book's association with existentialism.
Check out this follow up: Story retold from the perspective of the brother of the guy that Meursault killed on the beach.
Walking Away: Further Travels with a Troubadour on the South West Coast Path, a follow up to a book I read a few years ago called Walking Home, in which the author, Simon Armitage walks along a trail in England (The Pennine Way in Walking Home, the South West Coast Path in this one) and pays for it by doing poetry readings at the various stops along the way. Thought this one would be interesting, which it is, and also a possible preview for a vacation with the Missus. But parts of the trail are pretty brutal in terms of the climb, so if we ever do a walk in England, it will probably be one of the Loop walks in England, or the 138 mile Follow the Thames to the Sea path.
In 1946, Winston Churchill gave a speech which included a phrase that came to define much of the Cold War part of the Twentieth Century: he refereed to Soviet policies as dropping an Iron Curtain across Europe. It's known as the Iron Curtain Speech in his archives. He coined another phrase, one with less staying power: he referred to the UN system as a "temple of peace." He believed it could and would provide the necessary framework by which free peoples could prosper. But as a memorable phrase, it hasn't had staying power (probably because it's clunky). Enter, then, this new offering from Ohio U Press: Temple of Peace: International Cooperation and Stability Since 1945 is a collection of essays reminding us what that whole structure has provided. I ordered it from the press directly having not seen the cover, which I think is awful. There the book sits on my dining room table, as yet unread, and each time I walk past it I cringe a little (my wife openly mocks the title and cover when she sees it). I am embarrassed at the blatancy of my overt judging of the book by its cover, which seems to worsen (or make more trite) Churchill's phrase. I will read it at some point and report back - but it is not this day.
Probably the best intro to getting a sustainable diet in place while training to do any endurance sport. It's especially good for ultramarathons and triathlons since that's what Fitzgerald does himself. It's a little outdated on some of the nutritional information, but that can be supplemented by his more recent book, The Endurance Diet.
I'm Waiting for You and Other Stories ~ Kim Bo-Young I enjoyed these. The first and last stories are two sides of a couple's attempt and failure to game light speed time dilation. The middle story and coda are a dense but enjoyable story about a deity's struggle between the individual and the whole.
Pedro Paramo by Juan Rulfo. An early magical realist novel by Rulfo, a Mexican author. An influence on later works.
Iron Curtain Journals: January-May 1965, a volume of journals chronicling poet Allen Ginsberg's trips abroad to Cuba, Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union and, erm, England, missing huge chunks of the Yugoslavia journal because the government confiscated them and they still haven't turned up. Interesting that Ginsberg managed to get himself thrown out of not one but two of those countries (Cuba, Yugoslavia), which is a point he would often bring up to the worst of his right wing critics (in a "Hey, Communist governments hate me more than they hate you!" kinda way).
A propos of nothing in particular, a continuation of my recent theme of "Books About Plagues." Saramago's predictive power is less astute than Camus or Defoe (who I've also read recently) but he's a better storyteller and his playful prose works well with his terrifying subject matter.
First Person Singular: Stories ~ Haruki Murakami Murakami's writing about women has become so regressive that I can't enjoy it anymore. It's frustrating as there are parts of his style I really enjoy and fond memories of reading other novels, but they're just being buried in cringe-worthy output now.
It's even better than I remember and has me in the perfect mood for what I think the show will do for the season finale this week.
Ursula K. Le Guin -- The Dispossessed The final novel in this Hainish Novels & Stories, Vol. 1, collection.
Postcards from Babylon: the Church in American Exile, and interesting reading of the many ways American nationalism and patriotism distorts/perverts Christianity, especially in the Trump era (a position that has brought a lot of heat and no few threats to the author Brian Zahnd)
I read his A Farewell to Mars several years ago. He was on the peaceful anti-nationalism train already by that point and did a brilliant job of picking apart things like the Air Force chapel and what they symbolized about the church in America.